A dizzying nosedive into the deepest netherworlds of psychological reasoning, that is “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, for you in a nutshell.

The mind-bending and impossibly intricate wheels inside the human brain, spinning away at speeds faster than that of light and filled by unimaginable helpings of emotion, are the subject of this giant book that the author (a Nobel Prize-winning economist) tackles. What he aims to decipher, with the help of an explorative colleague, is how and why the human mind makes the choices that it does, how and why we are conditioned to take certain biases and preconceptions, color them with our own sense of objective reality and expel something out into the world that is a hazy mixture of the two.

Now, admittedly, that may not sound too intriguing at first glance. Or as engrossing, as a matter of fact – the art of intuition and instincts? That's an age-old topic already excavated to no end by countless psychologists through the ages. But only a few flips of the introductory pages will inject, into even the most jaded of readers, a curious gnat crawling around in the back of the mind that demands to know more. More about the true psychology behind the split-second perceptions we form in our day-to-day, moment-to-moment, socially engulfed existence.

And that is what keeps the pages turning.

Because what he talks about is not something meant only for scholars of the subject – it is one of the most critically acclaimed books of the twenty first century – but for everyone and anyone. Of the human race. Because everyone has the same human mind, everyone irrespective of where and under what circumstances they have grown up shares more or less the same physiology and psychological circuitry – a fact that he exploits to no end to make sure you know that what he is talking about is something that you, yes, even you, should know. And analyze.

He performs thought experiments on the reader, asks questions, tosses scenarios and anecdotes at random to impress on us just how strange and untraceable some of the decisions and conclusions we formulate in our daily life truly are. The choice between looking up at the bathroom mirror first or picking up the toothpaste off the shelf – a seemingly insignificant one – is dissected to such an unimaginable deep vivisection and traced through such long-winded routes down to an inconspicuous root that the reader is left with nothing more than a lingering fear… as to how that groggy early morning decision could ever be so enormously complex.

A subject that is handled masterfully and skillfully, by a writer spurred with enthusiasm for a theme that obviously throws up a lot of fodder for thought, makes for a very fun read on a topic that everyone can do well to affiliate themselves with. That is, after all, the aim of the author and finally a truth that everyone should confront – that no matter how independent you think your decisions are, you are ultimately already a product of opinions and facts that were formed long before you were looking. Or even knew you had to look!